Right now, Barack Obama has 63.7 million popular votes to John McCain’s 56.3 million, whereas third party candidates have roughly a collective 1.6 million. That works out to 52.4 percent of the vote for Obama and 46.3 percent for McCain … conspicuously close to our pre-election estimates of 52.3 percent for Obama and 46.2 percent for McCain.

I went through and tried to estimate where the outstanding votes are, by simply extrapolating outward from the current results in each state that has missing precincts. This is fairly crude, obviously … in Oregon, for instance, a disproportionate amount of the uncounted vote is in Portland, so Obama will probably perform better than these numbers. Nevertheless, here are the numbers of votes I estimate to be outstanding in each state:

So, roughly another 1.8 million votes for Obama and 1.3 million for McCain … most of the “missing” votes are in strong Obama states. That should get Obama’s margin in the popular vote up to about 6.3 points, or a net of around 7.85 million votes.

There are also provisional and absentee ballots to be counted in many states … the former will tend to favor Obama, the latter McCain. Total turnout should be somewhere in the 125-130 million range, actually not that much higher than 122 million that turned out in 2004, but still very impressive by modern standards.

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